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Book
Review
The bad girl of Rome
Kathryn
Hughes
It says
something about the reputation of the Borgia family that when,
one hot day in 1503, two of them went down with violent nausea,
everyone immediately assumed that they had somehow managed
to poison one another by mistake. In fact, on this occasion
it looks as though Pope Alexander VI and his son Cesare may
simply have been the victim of some bad seafood or a nasty
bout of malaria, but the point was that, as far as the talking,
writing, worrying classes of Renaissance Italy were concerned,
the Borgias were a byword for the dark arts of realpolitik.
 No
one's reputation has been damaged more by belonging to this
first family of pantomime evil than Lucrezia Borgia, daughter
of Pope Alexander and sister of Cesare. Her casual reputation
has been that of a murderous vamp who had only to sleep with
someone before slipping something nasty into their post-coital
wine. She was whispered to have had non-fraternal relations
with her brother, which was the cause, 300 years later, of
Lord Byron developing a perverse crush on her (he, too, was
hazy about how far you could go with your own flesh and blood).
Byron's thrill-seeking - he stole some of Lucrezia's golden
hairs from a locket she had sent to her lover - was part of
the 19th century's more general desire to turn Lucrezia into
the embodiment of every kind of female transgression. By the
time Victor Hugo and Donizetti had finished with her, Lucrezia
Borgia could barely stand for the burden of evil that was
slung around her fiendishly beautiful shoulders.
Sarah
Bradford's job, then, is to dust down Lucrezia and help us
to see her for what she really was - a young woman (she died
at 39) who was trying to play the best game she could with
the uneven hand she had been dealt. The first dud card, of
course, was the business of being born a girl, which meant
that from the age of 13 she was being handed round like a
parcel to suit her father's political game. Divorced at 17,
remarried and widowed soon after (Cesare, her brother, stepped
in to strangle the second husband), Lucrezia was 20 when she
took up the job that was to be the making of her. As the wife
of Alfonso d'Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, she became
an accomplished stateswoman, deftly running a green and golden
wedge of Adriatic Italy during her husband's many absences.
Bradford's
problem is that of all biographers working in the early modern
period: the stories may be there, but the characters aren't.
Personal letters, which to us are carriers of private thought
and feeling, were to the Borgias public documents, to be dictated
to scribes. Contemporary chroniclers, meanwhile, were interested
in the 'what and where' of the story rather than the why.
Even those witnesses who wrote apparently for their own eyes,
such as the diarist Johannes Burchard, the Pope's master of
ceremonies, seem to have thought in terms of spectacular set
pieces rather than deep structure. His account of the "Chestnut
Orgy" in the Vatican - where naked courtesans scrabbled
for chestnuts and prizes were offered to the man who could
have sex with the most women - has probably done more to blacken
Lucrezia's reputation than any other event. But did Lucrezia
laugh at these ghastly sights, did she squirm, or turn away,
or was she at the party simply for the dancing, which she
loved? None of these Burchard sees fit to tell us, so neither,
alas, can Bradford.
In many
places these public narratives deliver delicious detail, which
Bradford makes the most of. One of Lucrezia's main duties
as a Renaissance princess was to cut a bella figura wherever
she went, sending a loud message about her menfolk's worth
and status. Getting dressed was both a competitive sport and
a political act, and the chroniclers linger with disbelieving
pleasure over Lucrezia's cloak of crimson satin lined with
ermine, or her sleeves of cloth of gold which hung to the
floor. Even her mule would not appear in public without a
wide cloth of mulberry velvet and a harness of beaten gold.
The political
background to Bradford's book is a cat's cradle of intrigue
and quickly shifting alliances that requires you to keep your
historical wits about you at all times. Whether the end result
- the conclusion that Lucrezia was quite nice really - is
sufficiently new or startling to justify keeping faith with
nearly 400 dense pages of plotting is unclear. The problem
does not lie in Bradford's treatment or research, which is
immaculate, but is part of the larger problem of how to deal
with biographical subjects who lived at a time when to be
a sentient human being meant something very different from
what it does today.
This
review was first published in The Guardian
Copyright
(R) thedailystar.net 2004
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